Washington knew religion could divide or unify

Published 3:19 pm, Thursday, June 4, 2015

If I live to 77, we will celebrate the 300th Washington’s Birthday. George Washington has been called the indispensable man. His image is on our money, but the person has receded into mere image. His birthday has been merged into Presidents’ Day, where we do little political reflection but discover an excuse for sales featuring people dressed up in powdered wigs and Continental uniforms. As a public person, he was cognizant that his actions and words would be used as precedent. In our time, Washington is enlisted as an exemplar in our disputes about religion in the political arena.

I’ve been captivated by a new book on the Salem trials, A Storm of Witchcraft. Those were tried only 40 years before Washington was born. He was an exemplar of the generation that could write the First Amendment that seeks to protect free exercise of religion and at the same time create a safe space between religious institutions and governmental action.

On Ash Wednesday, many churches read from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says to practice piety away from public scrutiny (Mt. 6: 1-6). In many ways, George Washington followed this example in private and public life. I have no patience for those who try to enlist him into current squabbles about being devout. He was a member of the Episcopalian church board (vestry), but he seemed to attend church, at a variety of services, more when he travelled, than at home. Some sort of dispute with the church or a sermon led him to not receive Communion with any frequency.

Washington does exemplify the standards of the First Amendment establishment clause. He feared that religion can divide a polity as well as unify it. In a letter written during his first term as president he wrote: “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.”

At the same time, he saw religion as a vital support to the democratic experiment. In his Farewell Address he certainly saw religion as linked to the morality necessary for a republic to function. That should not be read as government support of particular religious institutions. He supported a chaplaincy in the military for its aid to military discipline, but feared that it could be a tool of religious discrimination as well.

He certainly did not subscribe to the notion of being a Christian nation. In a letter to a synagogue in Rhode Island: “For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens…”

Instead of emphasizing a “personal relationship” with the divine, Washington used the word, Providence, for God’s active involvement in human affairs, even as we struggled mightily to work with it or against it. I should not be surprised that he believed in providence in that he led a revolution against a most powerful foe, escaped death a

number of times, and went on to become the first president of that new nation. How did we produce such a crop of remarkable statesman in the Founding Era? I look at the current crop of political leaders and wonder where is Providence directing us now?